China promises action on slave labor claims

By Chris Buckley

HONGTONG, China (Reuters) - China has promised a sweeping crackdown on a slave labor scandal in a poor part of the country where poverty and unbridled growth have made work abuses commonplace.

Following calls for action by top leaders, the Ministry of labor and Social Security pledged to send a team to central China, where state media have said up to 1,000 minors may have been forced to work in slave-like conditions in brick kilns.

The local authorities in Shanxi, one of two provinces involved, said they would punish government officials for dereliction of duty unless all of the abused workers were freed within 10 days.

But in this hard-scrabble corner of China, where power is often the key to resources and wealth, people also pointed to official complicity in the trapped workers' plights.

"The officials said that we were illegal and so they came for money but they didn't do any more than that," said Zhang Mei, the wife of one kiln owner detained by police.

"They wanted the money," she said from the confines of her home, just meters from the notorious kiln, where rooms once housing workers were strewn with ragged bedding covered in dust and scraps of steamed bread, probably their staple food.

Reports of abducted children have emerged as parents have spoken out about their desperate search for loved-ones.

Zhang Xiaoying, whose 15-year old son was tempted by the promise of fat wages just as the family battled to pay hefty medical bills, is one of the luckier parents today.

Her boy, from her native Henan, escaped just last week, after months toiling in a Shanxi kiln.

Asked how she felt when he returned, she said:

"I felt bad because I see he had suffered so much. He worked 16 hour days in the kiln on a meager diet of noodles and steamed bread," she said.

"He would have run away earlier but he had no money and they wouldn't give him any wages." Zhang asked that her son's name not be disclosed.

GOVERNMENT PROBLEM

Villagers in Shanxi's Hongtong county described a mixture of poverty, opportunity and widespread indifference as behind this latest scandal.

A resources boom in this dusty corner of rural China has thrown up new opportunities for wealth, but also for exploitation of poor, often ill-educated farming families.